US Servers: 7:00~8:00am PDT | 10:00~11:00am EDT | 15:00~16:00 BST | 16:00~17:00 CET
EU Servers: 9:00~10:00pm PDT | 12:00~1:00am EDT | 05:00~06:00 BST | 06:00~07:00 CET

From the EQ2 Forums:

TIME-LOCKED SERVERS

• Mitigation will no longer display as debuffed (red) on the TLE servers due to the server mitigation reduction.
• Repeatable quests will now give a reduced coin reward.

Time-Locked PvP

• Server mitigation reduction will no longer effect PvP combat.

LIVE EVENTS

• Chris Weathers is now selling the “Kelethin Mossy Table” for City Token, as intended.
• The Tome of Tinkering – Quest is now listed in the World Event category in the quest journal.

ITEMS

• Corrected an issue that prevented [eq2u]pyrorock dust[/eq2u] from dropping.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Greetings Norrathians!

Here’s a quick update on what’s coming up for EQ2.

Server Consolidation

EverQuest 2 is best with friends, and in August we’re working on bringing players from different servers together!

Our engineers have continued with database work that will allow not only cross-server dungeons and true cross-server battlegrounds, but also server consolidation. It’s a very complicated process, but we are targeting the end of August for US Servers to start testing at the very least.

From the EQ2 Forums:

PVP General

• Fixed an issue where players could mentor below the minimum PvP mentor level while inside PvP exempt zones.

Time-Locked PvP

• Pumice stones are now available from gratified merchants.
• Qeynos and Freeport now correctly flag opposing faction players for PvP.

ABILITIES PvP

• Evac spells will no longer work on characters that are in PvP combat.

ITEMS

• [eq2u]Spirit Totem of the Wolf[/eq2u] will now grant a small “in combat” speed bonus.
• Fixed a bug with personal depots that increased status and coin rent for the houses they were placed in.

MARKETPLACE

• Increased the size of the depots on the Marketplace. Their description now displays how many items they will contain.

Legendary author Douglas Adams once quipped “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

Realizing that this is neither a promise or guarantee, Windstalker has given us a glimmer of detail about the much-needed Server Merges that will merge a number of lower-population Live PvE servers…

.@Henry15Stefans we are targeting end of august for #eq2 merges/consolidation.

— Holly Longdale (@TheWindstalker) July 29, 2015

If you missed the merriment last week of Kander and Gninja running around Stormhold, the new Time-Locked Expansion server, and telling funny anecdotes, the video is now online! Although players had quickly figured out on Tuesday morning that Queen’s Colony and the Outpost of the Overlord (collectively the Isle of Refuge v2) were returning, it was a surprise to all that the Far Journey boat trip also came back as the first thing new characters experience.

The livestream video is mostly the guys having a good time and talking about what it took to bring these zones back. Most of the EQ2 team have continued working on expansion 12 (which goes into beta in October and launches in November) while a few members worked to get these TLE servers. The stream doesn’t contain any surprise news.

Here are the update notes applicable to all servers from the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• Fixed a bug where occasionally an entity would spawn and show an incorrect name for a moment before switching to the proper name.

PVP

• The infamy progress bar has been removed.

ITEMS

• Ankh of Ydall will now correctly apply its crit bonus to the group.

Here are the update notes applicable to Time-Locked servers:

Attention players: we will perform a general maintenance beginning at 6:00AM PDT on Tuesday, July 28. The current estimated downtime for this maintenance is two to four hours, depending on the service.

This maintenance may impact the following Daybreak services across all games:

• Game logins for all Daybreak games
• Forum & Web logins for all Daybreak games
• Commerce and account management for all Daybreak games

PLEASE NOTE: This is not a game-specific maintenance. There will be no update or patch notes.

Thank you for your patience as we complete this maintenance.

~The Team at Daybreak

Time Zone Conversions (assuming 4 hours)

• Tue July 28 @ 6:00am ~ 10:00am PT
• Tue July 28 @ 9:00am ~ 1:00pm ET
• Tue July 28 @ 14:00 ~ 18:00 BST
• Tue July 28 @ 15:00 ~ 19:00 CET

As of 7:21am PDT, the maintenance is complete:

The general Daybreak maintenance is now complete. There may be game-specific maintenances still in process for @everquestii and @H1Z1game.

— Daybreak Games (@DaybreakGames) July 28, 2015

Most of today’s updates seem to apply to the Time Locked Expansion servers. I’ll ask about the update notes clarifying which updates apply to TLE vs Standard servers.

From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
General
Lava will once again…huuuuuuurt.
Evils may now return to Antonica from Frostfang Sea via the bell.

Queen’s Colony
Direspike is no longer able to be charmed.
Players can now switch to a groupmate’s instance by right-clicking their name in the group window.

ITEMS
The Finsher IV should now provide the correct amount of potency.
Characters with exploited copies of Far Journey Backpack will have them deleted from their inventory.

QUESTS

Journey is Half the Fun: The Feerrott leg of the race has had its timer set to a more realistic timer.

After this morning’s patch of the live servers at 7:00am PDT, EverQuest II players are noticing a curious selection at the Character Select screen. TLE servers aren’t scheduled to launch til Noon, but players can step through the process of creating a TLE character and see which choices are available, including a few surprising ones. It’s conceivable that this is a bug or glitch.  This topic is blowing up on the forums in a half dozen threads including this one.

Here are tomorrow’s Update Notes for the non-TLE EQ2 Live Servers. From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
General

• The mercenary den is once again available in Qeynos and Freeport.

ABILITIES / ALTERNATE ADVANCEMENT

• Fixed a bug that was causing many spells to spam time-locked server restrictions.

ITEMS

• The Finisher IV has had its passive bonus increased.

LIVE EVENTS

• “Great Balls of Fire” – Mad Mattie should offer this quest for everyone until 50 completions.

BATTLEGROUNDS

• Pumice Stone is now available from the expendables merchant.

There’s some downtime today in preparation for the TLE servers. We don’t expect update notes. From the EQ2 Forums:

US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Monday, July 20, 2015 at 7:00AM PDT* for maintenance, in preparation for our Time-Locked expansion server launch. Estimated downtime is approximately one hour.

EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Monday, July 20, 2015 at 7:00AM PDT* for an update. (Approx. 3:00PM London Time on July 20, 2015). Estimated downtime is one hour.

Alle deutschsprachigen Server werden um 16:00 CET am 20.07.2015 zwecks einer Serveraktualisierung heruntergefahren. Die vorgesehene Stillstandszeit wird etwa 1 Stunde(n) betragen.

Le serveur de langue française sera arrêté à 16:00 CET le 20-07-2015 pour une mise à jour du serveur. Le temps d’arrêt sera d’environ 1 heure.

From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Kelethin

• Philosopher Yubee in Kelethin will now give the same advice pertaining to Erollisi Marr, as Philosopher Rhimes.

ITEMS

• Boots from fabled EoF dungeons have had their weapon damage bonus and spell weapon damage bonus corrected.
• The Wild Divine will proc when Healing Arrow or Healing Barrage are cast.
• Crafted and Merchant versions of the altar to Erollisi Marr are now available.
• Hand of Thule’s Avatar now grants stamina, instead of ridiculous amounts of strength.

QUESTS

• Power to the Tower – The damaged core should only be resetting when it is not successfully defended.

Update as of 9:45am PDT: Game and Account logins and Forum access have continued to be sporadically available. Census appears to be down, disabling EQ2U and Dragon’s Armory. More as we have it…

Update from Smedley as 5:40pm PDT last night, 29 hours into DDOS:

And sorry to say more DDOS. I apologize for the issues we are having. I have to own pissing them off and I'm sorry.

— John Smedley (@j_smedley) July 11, 2015

Just sorry they are taking it out on you, our players.

— John Smedley (@j_smedley) July 11, 2015

Update: DDoS has once again resumed against Daybreak Games, 24 hours after the attack began and which has continued with only a few interruptions:

We are continuing to resolve issues from a Distributed Denial of Service event. We will provide updates as available.

— Landmark (@LandmarkGame) July 10, 2015

Update: The DDoS seemed to once again abate approximately 15 minutes ago. Daybreak may have jinxed it by announcing such:

Things are looking good, and servers are unlocking. We'll continue to monitor the situation.

— EverQuest II (@everquestii) July 10, 2015

Update: Other than a 2 hour break from 2am to 4am PDT this morning and another 20 minute break around noon PDT, Daybreak Games froums, login, and game servers have been under sustained attack from DDoS flooding since 4pm yesterday (July 9th). A DDoS attack makes use of thousands of compromised computers (often in China as millions of internet users there are running unpatched Windows XP / Internet Explorer 6 machines) to send gigaquads of garbage packets to a specific target. The attack can be visualized in realtime at Norse Corp Security’s Realtime Mapping website. Attacks affecting Daybreak Games are routed through Level3 backbone in St. Louis, MO.

We are continuing to resolve issues from a Distributed Denial of Service event. We will provide updates as available.

— Daybreak Games (@DaybreakGames) July 10, 2015

EU servers are now 3 hours late patching and Holly has an update that it will be another 2 hours before EU servers are back up. That’s 2pm PDT, 5pm EDT, 22:00 GMT, 23:00 CET.

The #EQ2 Beta servers are up after the EU patch which is delayed by internet funk. We're hoping for about 2pm if all goes well.

— Holly Longdale (@TheWindstalker) July 7, 2015

Original article follows…

From the EQ2 Forums:

Attention players: we will perform a general maintenance beginning at 7:00AM PDT* on Wednesday, July 1. The current estimated downtime for this maintenance is two to four hours, depending on the service.

This maintenance may impact the following Daybreak services across all games:

• Game logins for all Daybreak games
• Forum & Web logins for all Daybreak games

PLEASE NOTE: This is not a game-specific maintenance. There will be no update or patch notes.

Thank you for your patience as we complete this maintenance.

~The Team at Daybreak

Time Zone Conversions (assuming 4 hours)

• Wed July 1 @ 7:00am ~ 11:00am PDT
• Wed July 1 @ 10:00am ~ 2:00pm EDT
• Wed July 1 @ 15:00 ~ 19:00 BST
• Wed July 1 @ 16:00 ~ 20:00 CET

From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Fabled Echoes of Faydwer

• Collectibles in the Fabled Echoes of Faydwer dungeons will now lock you to the instance when looted.

The Fabled Crypt of Valdoon [Advanced Solo and Heroic]

• You can now click Valdoon while he’s giving his speech to initiate combat sooner.

Fabled Freethinker’s Hideout [Challenge Raid]

• The werewolf guards at the entrance should now have the intended amount of health.

ITEMS

• Corrected the spell description for the solo and raid versions of All for One, they now correctly say 48 to 148 potency for the solo version, and 58 to 158 potency for the heroic version.
• Icons on the bottom fragments of Ydal now know left from right.
• A Quarter of the Ankh of Ydal items will automatically convert to the new collection piece versions.
• Fixed a bug with the ability mod of Paingiver’s Gloves.
• Altar of Malice Armor fragments and Armor Upgrade gems may now be sold for status.
• Lore and Legend items may now be sold for status.
• Slaughterer’s Boots now have the correct spell weapon damage bonus, and weapon damage bonus.

CAUTION: After June 2016, barring some miraculous workaround, it will no longer be possible to play EverQuest II on Windows XP. The exact change being made has not been explained but this is what we know.

Despite going end-of-life on April 8, 2014 and no longer receiving crucial security updates, Windows XP continues to serve the computers of a surprising number of EverQuest II players a decade after its introduction. The reasons for running such an old operating system seem to center on inertia (the horror of locating and reinstalling all of one’s software) and budget. Windows 7 is not exactly a free upgrade, and Microsoft has never offered a direct XP -> 7 upgrade path. Also, Windows Driver Model, introduced with Vista and carried forth in 7, 8, and 10, has left behind a mountain of older hardware that will never sport Windows 7-compatible drivers. For those EQ2 players on a fixed income, a $300 expenditure for a new or upgraded computer and Windows 7 license can be difficult to justify.

Last Tuesday’s update brought us Fabled versions of dungeons and raid zones hearkening back to the Echoes of Faydwer expansion. It also brought an unexpected change that is making it difficult for certain Windows XP users to login to EverQuest II. This is a situation that is frustrating for both players and developers. Players want to login to EQ2 without making changes to their computers. Meanwhile the EQ2 team has to spend extra time investigating and debugging game client crashes in Windows XP — time they could spend working on other things.

After the jump, some player-reported temporary workarounds to get EQ2 running on Windows XP…

From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
The Fabled Acadechism [Advanced Solo and Heroic]

• Kelzaral the Animator should be much less destructive.

The Fabled Freethinker Hideout
Drops for The Fabled Freethinker Hideout have had the following adjustments:

• Moved armor drops from Treyloth to Othysis.
• Moved accessory drops from Makonis to Treyloth.
• Makonis will now always drop 2 armor pieces.

Precipice of Power [Raid]

• You can now combine two cruxes from the same boss drop table to form the other from the same drop table by examining the cruxes.

ITEMS

• The effect “Bolstered Block” can now be triggered by using “Blinding Dust”.

From EverQuest II Lead Designer Kyle “Kander” Vallée on the EQ2 Forums:

Greetings Fellow Norrathians!

Just stopping in to give everyone the low down on the new Fabled Echoes of Faydwer zones we will be releasing today.

People are asking what zones will become Fabled and what play styles will be covered. The answer is we tried to cover as many as possible with this release. We have 3 Fabled Echoes of Faydwer heroic zones: The Acadechism, The Court of Innovation and the Crypt of Valdoon. We also decided to make an advanced solo version of each of these zones for our solo players and are releasing the Fabled Freethinker Hideout raid zone in two flavors, Normal and Challenge.

• The Fabled Acadechism [Heroic]
• The Fabled Acadechism [Advanced Solo]

• The Fabled Court of Innovation [Heroic]
• The Fabled Court of Innovation [Advanced Solo]

• The Fabled Crypt of Valdoon [Heroic]
• The Fabled Crypt of Valdoon [Advanced Solo]

• The Fabled Freethinker Hideout [Raid]
• The Fabled Freethinker Hideout [Challenge Raid]

Downtime Notice

US EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Tuesday, June 23, 2015 at 7:00AM PDT* for an update. Estimated downtime is approximately two hours.

EU EverQuest II Live Servers will be brought offline on Tuesday, June 23, 2015 at 7:00AM PDT* for an update. (Approx. 3:00PM London Time on June 23, 2015). Estimated downtime is two hours.

Echoes of Faydwer Fabled (Level 100)

That was fast! After a week on the Beta and Test servers, the Echoes of Faydwer Fabled solo and group dungeons plus a raid zone are patching live tomorrow, providing new content for level 100 players. These new zones also drop this summer’s Ethereal weapons which are on a 30-day rotation as previously mentioned.

Un-Deleting Characters and Items

For the first 15 years of its history, SOE has been known for its exemplary customer service which included the extraordinary safety net of recovering deleted and transmuted items as well as deleted characters (sometimes due to hacked accounts). In the aftermath of recent changes within the company in its transition to Daybreak Games, we’ve seen petition times jump to 3-6 days, and cutbacks on what support events are covered, particularly on deleted characters. It’s our understanding that restoring a hacked account can take several hours of painstaking reconstruction and digging through log files.

With tomorrow’s update, players who mistakenly Delete an Item or Character will now be able to restore them for Daybreak Cash. Player opinion has been rancorous and divided on this issue. On one side, players are castigated for their carelessness with the delete button or use of weak passwords, while others are quick to remind us EverQuest II is not a free game and most pay a monthly subscription, plus Campaigns and/or Expansions and surely there is enough room under that umbrella for this safety net.

As posted by Chrol on the EQ2 Forums on Tuesday, June 16th:

Hey all,

The following instances from Echoes of Faydwer (expansion 3) are now available on Test and Beta servers as Fabled level 100 versions:

• The Fabled Acadechism [Advanced Solo & Heroic]
• The Fabled Court of Innovation [Advanced Solo & Heroic]
• The Fabled Crypt of Valdoon [Advanced Solo & Heroic]
• The Fabled Freethinker Hideout [Raid & Challenge Raid]

You’ll find the entrance to these dungeons (a door!) just off the dock in Butcherblock Mountains at approximately 724, 24, 581. They can also be accessed individually through their original entrance locations within Greater Faydark, Klak’Anon, and Loping Plains.

There are a ton of new items, collections, missions and challenges so give them a whirl and please reply here with any and all feedback and bugs.

Thanks!

-Chrol

UPDATE from Windstalker as of 10am PDT:

Servers are coming up for #EQ2!

And earlier:

ETA for #EQ2 servers is 10am currently. There was an issue staging the data. Hamsters are on full burn.

Original article after the jump…

From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Precipice of Power [Raid]

• Tribunal adds should despawn even if you do not kill the original copy of the Tribunal boss.

Ossuary: Cathedral of Bones [Raid]

• Villadre’s adds should now despawn when she resets or is defeated.

ABILITIES

• Consistent Strike and Consistent Smite will now do damage at low levels.

PVP

• Kylong Warfields will now grant Marks of Bloodshed to players over level 95.

BATTLEGROUNDS

• Battleground of Theer tiles will no longer apply buffs or debuffs to players on the tiles, with the exception of the Order tile which will still damage those upon it.
• Battleground of Theer will now kick players who have hidden in the protected spawn points for an excessive amount of time.

ITEMS

• Several Altar of Malice weapons that had an erroneous extra white adornment slot have had them removed.
• Gemstone of Scornful Malevolence may now be used to upgrade new block armor.
• Ethereal Expertise will now message when it is applied, as well as when it is consumed.
• Ethereal Expertise will no longer break swarm pets.

TRADESKILLS

• Zander’s Choral Rebuff II (Grandmaster) may now be crafted.

QUESTS

• Zikana Sly’ssar will now offer his quests to Aerakyn.

From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
F.S. Distillery: Stowaways [Event Heroic] and [Challenge]

• The curable version of Supply Chain will no longer target mercenaries.

MERCENARIES

• Lady Gretta Cheroon should now be a female when casting illusions on her.

and from Kander on the EQ2 Forums:

Guys, there is an issue with the Ethereal weapons. Yes, they are dropping but no, its not correctly. This should be correctly dropping tomorrow morning.

and from Holly “Windstalker” Longdale‘s twitter:

Morning update for #EQ2 tomorrow. We'll be increasing the drop rates of the summer ethereal weapons.

— Holly Longdale (@TheWindstalker) June 8, 2015

Thus addressing the concern that of the four Ethereal weapons added on Friday, only [eq2u]Fai Thass, The Ravager[/eq2u] has dropped, and only for 2 players on Oasis. You can watch Recent Item Discoveries on EQ2U, specifically Ethereals for the last 30 days, to see them roll in.

You can now watch today’s June 4th Livestream on Twitch

and on Youtube: